Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

Back in college I did a paper on if this was ethical or not for my bioethics class, I warn people to really take a step back from the positive possibilities with something like this and understand that these are wild animals being trained to become slaves to benefit our human failings and appetites.<p>I would definitely draw a line between this kind of domestication and the domestication of animals by our ancestors for our own survival. This is trash created by humans, and the human responsible should be the asshole who picks it up. At that point, we&#x27;re the ones that should be domesticated, not crows.

Bonus points when the crows learn they can speed up the process by dive bombing a smoker, causing them to run away in terror, dropping their cigarette in the process.

This seems neat, but cigarette butts contain toxic chemicals. Training birds to perform an action, but at the same time possibly poison themselves, is ethically perverse. What if their population collapses because of the exposure to something in the butts? (and perhaps this effects other parts of the ecosystem dependent on the services of crows ... like, but not limited to, mitigating hygiene hazards via carcass removal).<p>Maybe we could train the people to pick up their own butts.

&gt; When we started doing research we found out there is a guy in the States that is teaching crows to collect coins. His name is Joshua Klein.<p>It&#x27;s commonly agreed that this never worked successfully in the wild.<p>&gt; In that correction the NY Times states that the experiments never succeeded in teaching the crows to drop the coins into the slot.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joshua_Klein#Crows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joshua_Klein#Crows</a><p>&gt; Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;04&#x2F;12&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;04&#x2F;12&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;12letters-t-CORRE...</a>

As a thought experiment, imagine if this mutually beneficial behaviour went on for hundreds&#x2F;thousands of years to the point that the animals lost their insincts for hunting&#x2F;finding food independently. It would be a disaster if suddently humans changed the conditions of the relationship by, for example, outlawing cigarettes in favour of vaping.<p>Does anyone know of any real-world examples of this happening? The only ones I can think of are the domestication of cats, dogs and pigs, but left to their own devices those animals revert to their natural behaviour fairly quickly.<p>Edit:<p>I found this quote unbelievable; &quot;Cigarettes are the most littered item on earth. Worldwide about 4.5 trillion cigarettes are littered each year.&quot; That&#x27;s 650 for every person on the planet.

This may also train smokers who do throw away their butts to instead think it&#x27;s ok to throw them anywhere.

Also <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecrowbox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecrowbox.com&#x2F;</a> were they apparently trained captive crows to pickup coins in return for food, there&#x27;s also a TED talk the guy behind it gave.<p>I&#x27;ve briefly looked at the &#x27;Crowded Cities&#x27; page, I&#x27;m still not sure how the crows realise they get food though for cigarette butts? Does it rely on them randomly dropping something in the pot, and then getting food and continuing to do it?

They&#x27;re smart enough to find cigarette butts wherever they are, not just the ground. I predict you&#x27;d see a lot of crows stealing lit cigarettes and emptying ashtrays etc.

Or you know, we could get rid of cigarettes. Oh wait but what will happen to all the crow jobs?!

I wonder if this will be the beginning of crow-sourcing.

I think this idea is really cool, but monitization might be an issue. No individual or private company, except those with enormous sites like Boeing and Google would be potential customers, because the decrease of cigarette butts would be spread over possibly a mile radius (interested to see what the actual statistics would be though). Of course, the idea then is to target municipalities of dense downtown areas. Is buying, maintaining, powering, and repairing this machine worth the handful of cigarette butts that would otherwise be washed into a drainage ditch or picked up by a street sweeper?

Cool and thought-provoking idea! I was struck by this statement however:<p><i>Right now we are building our first Crowbar. All different parts are working and ready for assembly. Next step: testing with Crows.</i><p>Why not start with crow testing? That&#x27;s the &quot;Talk to customers&quot; of this project [0]. Instead, they started off with something we can be sure of with today&#x27;s technology: machine recognising cigarette butts.<p>[0] Technically talking to city authorities should be the first step, but I couldn&#x27;t tell whether this was a for-profit project.

Couldn&#x27;t we just force cigarette companies to make cigarettes biodegrade in the rain? Seriously, they&#x27;re basically all chemicals anyways. After a few years the problem would vanish.

I wonder what other tasks we could train species to do in exchange for something they want? For instance, cane toads are invasive and toxic enough that predators usually leave them alone. Supposing that cane toads can be deposited in a receptacle by some bird who wouldn&#x27;t otherwise eat it without being harmed by the toxin, could they be used to eradicate cane toads in places where they&#x27;re not wanted in exchange for food?

I&#x27;m too lazy to build this myself but a similar system to encourage pet owners to dispose of pet waste at the park by exchanging dog poop for a treat.

Now I&#x27;m picturing a murder of crows on their smoke break.

My evil plan was to make peanut-butter vending machines for raccoons.<p>I figured you&#x27;d have to trap a few and show them how it worked then release them to spread the word, so to speak.

I seem to remember back in the 70s and early 80s, cigarette butts being everywhere was a problem, then for awhile, they disappeared, like smokers got trained not to throw them on the ground. But lately, they seem to be back, like new smokers came up without remembering what it was like in the 70s and 80s, and they just throw them on the ground again.

I wounder if this would work for other corvids as well, like say, ravens or magpies. As I understand, magpies are also rather intelligent. I can imagine crows and magpies getting into fights over who gets to take the cigarette butt to the food dispensing machine.

Have any of these stations been deployed so far? Interesting idea!

LOL I had this same exact idea once but with pigeons... I can&#x27;t wait to show my wife&#x2F;stupid-idea-confidant this. I love it

I take it this hasn&#x27;t be proven or demonstrated yet?

Breaking News: Murder of Crows Commit Murder. You won&#x27;t believe why!

Why aren&#x27;t we ticketing &#x2F; fining people who litter in this way? To all the hippocrite smoking environmentalists, I say F U.